Tamar Joshua Rowe

Drinking water makes it throb and doesn't help. Eating food makes me perkier, but doesn't make the pain go away. Being in a hot bath made it throb horribly (I ended up getting out for a while until the water had cooled down at bit and my skin didn't look so boiled) - I should possibly have expected that one, but eh. Walking makes it throb. Sitting still for any length of time still leaves it aching.

It's like a thick line of pain from the middle of my hairline, down diagonally to the middle of my left eyebrow, and then down behind the eye. At various points during the day the vision in that eye... well, it hasn't gone dark, exactly, but I have lost the 3D effect and had that side look fairly dim. I've got some 'pain lumps' in various other bits of my head, but that's the main one.

I feel very fragile right now. Harrowing conversation with a fellow physicist in terror of the exam tomorrow, and another very emotionally in-depth conversation right after.

And I'm still dealing with the constant low-level nausea and resultant body-woe of the antibiotics.

But now I definitely have to go to the exam tomorrow, however little point there is, because I've got to walk the aforementioned physicist from Vanbrugh to the exam, if he'll leave his room. And that's without bothering the medical people to give me my bloody results beforehand.

At least there'll be larp after?

I just feel so very much like an ill-timed puff of wind could smash me into a million pieces right now.

Done:

( The Done List )

To Do:

( The To Do List )

ETA: I have now eaten soup. (Woah, having food in my stomach feels *weird*)

I have also gotten drunk and ordered shopping from Tesco. They're going to give me bread and vegetables and microwave rice on Wednesday! Also some mince! I shall make bolognaise! ...if I have someone to help stir the pot. Which I should do, because there will be an Alex on Wednesday!

Oh, two yogurts and half a sausage isn't actually enough food for a day, is it?

And yet... downstairs. Moving.

I walked up the the shops like an old lady, bought my eggs and milk and orange juice, then went into the pharmacy on my way to the butchers and they said that they'd pick up the perscription for me, and then the butchers had gluten-free sausages! So I got some of them as well as bacon, and also a conversation about another patron's sister and the horrible loosing-weight thing.

And now I am home and there can be food. Or at least orange juice, because food requires cooking requires staying stood up for a while at a time.

I voted! I mostly did the thing of saying 'yes' to AV, and have no clue about the Hull Road candidates except that the Labour Candidate is a prat. I think. That might have been last year's. So I voted by party, which is probably not nearly as good as voting by candidate, but still makes the prat parties less likely to get in, so.

Also I spent most of the day in bed instead of doing, well, anything. This was less than optimal, but the doctor-wah is still kicking my arse - I have no idea what the fuck I'm going to do about it. I spoke to my supervisor (late for the meeting I arranged earlier in the week) about the assignment, and I should be able to get a note from any doctor at the practice based on my probable iron levels. However, the test is on Monday, which is when the deadline is, so...

However, hanging out with James this evening has motivated me somewhat towards not throwing in the towel pre-emptively - which I guess is what picking sleep over life is, really. I'm going to do the 'keep being alive' thing, and the 'try to do this assignment and not fail it entirely' thing, and the 'keep going to larp because that makes me happy and happy -> more spoons*' thing.



(I still can't quite believe that the response to 'I'm so brain-tired that I need entire days of rest to be vaguely functional on the rest of the days' was 'maybe your body just needs the sleep'. ARgh!)

*It's not that I get more spoons from being happy, so much as being an angstbucket costs more. When I'm happy, I get to use more of them for useful things.

Today there was a flickering light at the front of the lecture room, and by half-way through the revision session my face was numb and I had the full-body tired that made it difficult to keep my pen in my hand. By the end of the first hour I had my head in my hands going 'oh, gods, light and sound (Yvette's voice had a weird reverb effect on somewhere between my ears and brain) but mostly light' and was pressing my eyes before not too long (though I'm not sure how that's supposed to help, really, it just sort of happens) and then one of the nattering undergrads behind me dropped his pen, and tapped me on the shoulder to get me to pick it up for him.

(Am I right in thinking that it's easily percieved that a person with their head in their hands and rocking can generally be guessed to be having some sensation issues and shouldn't be touched? Yeah?)

( I had a day! )

I think I may need to rewrite my food rules. Currently, I've got it as a rule that I don't leave the house or do anything strenuous until I've had breakfast - or at least had easily nommable food with me, like an apple and breakfast bar or something. When I had to go far from my house in the morning and would often feel dizzy before I got another chance to eat, this was a good rule, because getting dizzy is bad. It was also a good rule because tbh, I was hungry when I needed to eat.

The past couple of weeks - it's been a bit of a creep, but has become more and more apparent - this rule has meant that I've sat in my pyjamas reading the internet and maybe drinking tea until I felt hungry, and then my day would start. This is extremely inefficent, time-wise, especially as later in the day/evening I'm a lot lazier and time seems to go faster. So, I'm going to trial a model of the day in which I set an alarm and Do Something at/close to home before breakfast/after just a yogurt or something - going to the shop, washing my hair, maybe even going for a walk or something that's almost-exercise-but-not-quite. (I have a set of light wrist/ankle weights - trying to start being stronger would make me hungry, right?)

And now it's occurring to me that on University days last term I'd eat something to fulfil the 'rule' before leaving the house (like a yogurt or half-bowl of cereal or some fruit), and then have a 'proper' fried breakfast later on at Roger Kirk - more like a brunch, really - after doing a lecture or some problem questions. So, my current way of organising is just substituting 'more sleep' or 'internet' for 'actually doing some work'. I was finding, in the later part of last term, that I was finding the days I woke up on campus to be the most productive, especially when I had late lectures, because I had to be out by nine o'clock and frequently only had the 'breakfast' at about half-past ten when Graham or James appeared and I could give them the bits of breakfast special that were made of wheat. That's an hour and a half-ish a day of being productive, so between three and four and a half hours a week of work (or attempted work) which wouldn't have gotten done otherwise.

So, yeah, I'll try that. I kinda wish I'd resolved this earlier in the holiday... One week (and three hours) until my exam...

So, I turned on the computer all happy because my binder arrived in the post and I wanted to share the glee. I checked my email first, because I do, and while I was doing that my meds alarm went off and so I did that and realised that as it was eleven o'clock, the receptionists at the health centre wouldn't be on lunch break yet, so I could ring up and make the appointment that I need to have in just-less-than-three-weeks.

I was only on hold for ten minutes, and when they picked up it took me a moment to realise that they had, and then I briefly lost my words. So I did my usual thing that I do when that happens, of chucking the script of keywords out of my brain before my mouth can mangle them too badly - "Need. An. Appointment. Doctor. Griffith. Less-Than-Three-Weeks. Hull Road Surgery?" - and she repeated the name of the doctor and said a date, to which I said 'is that less than three weeks?' and she counted up and said 'yes, just', while I jabbered with 'because the Hull Road surgery it's usually easier to get an earlier appointment...' (after I find my words again I tend to get as much milage out of them as possible) and then she was all '...what? No.' and 'splained to me how I'd called up the University Health Centre, and after she looked up my details, that I was a University student, and so I was supposed to see doctors at the University, not Hull Road...

I was confused at her, because I've always been fine booking appointments at Hull Road through that number - it's the same number, isn't it? (No!) - and I go to the Hull Road surgery because it's across the road from my house... So she harumphed and made the appointment, on the same day that she'd offered me earlier, at Hull Road, and tried to get rid of me as fast as possible despite having said the time in 'ten-to-' format, which is sure-fire way to get me to miss an appointment, so I asked her to wait and repeated it as '-fifty?' while trying to write it down.

You'd think that receptionists at a doctor's surgery would be open to the idea that sometimes, they might have to talk to disabled people - people who can't speak (or hear!) well, who get easily confused, who are slow in writing things down. I guess it's fine when they're old people, but students should be sucking it up and using their super-youth-powers against all types of illness and infirmity, I guess. -_-;;

That, or she really wanted to get an early lunch-break.